Save time and money while helping the economy!

Like most business owners, you have a lot to do. So much so that you think you should bring someone on full time. While this might be true, consider the option of using Freelance professionals to get you through the surge. A friend and colleague of mine runs’ a very successful photography business (www.LigaPhotography.com) and recently we had a discussion about this very topic. It became clear to me that the Distributed Organization Model can bring a business clear savings. Abby has successfully used the talents of other professionals to boost her productivity and enhance her growing brand name with great success. When needed, she near-shores some of her workload to create an efficiency that frees her to focus her creative juices on her core business.

So where to begin, what should you outsource to your new organization, and what is the best method to monitor and ensure you get what you pay for.

1. Understand your business - get your head literally around everything going on and understanding how everything works (believe it or not some business owners don’t know). This is important because when you had off a task and your freelance professional has a question or needs clarification, having a firm understanding of what you do and why will save time and money. This also is where you can, where appropriate, defer to the professional. These people could provide some good insight and further fine tune your existing process.

2. Start with the small tasks – this is almost counter-intuitive in those things that you may do everyday, one would suspect that these are the areas to distribute to your new organization; when in fact, you may want to hold back. These activities could be ready for a process improvement exercise and a deeper understanding of what really is going on there. However, activities that you may do 4 or 5 times per month are the ones you may want to put on the radar to distribute to your team.

3. Monitoring and staying in contact - There are lots of free online collaboration sites. Google and Zoho have some of the best and most intuitive online applications.

So where do the saving come in? Really, it’s simple. What ever your specialty most of what you do is in support of it. The value is in the time savings and the ability to focus on what you do best. For example, answering emails to inquiry requests, monthly bill payments, in the case of my good friend Abby Liga the photographer, it might be putting together wedding albums or doing prep work on photos. Whatever the case may be for you, your core business is not doing all of the other “stuff”. These things are very important to the life of your business but they are not your “core” business. When you eliminate time spent on these types of activities, you can focus on making your core business even better. Large companies will find the quality of their goods or services go down and consequently so will their market share ( A good example of this is the US auto industry. They have focused their business on selling parts and service for their fleet, among other things, instead of making the highest quality vehicles possible. Their focus has moved from what their core business is and that is making cars).

It must also be said that work must be authorized by you prior to the start date, have a well defined scope, and a time table has been communicated. Set a reasonable completion and delivery date as well as what they should do when a problem arises. Clear communication is a key to using the Distributed Organizational Model successfully. I will post a more detailed analysis later along with any templates that can aide you in creating your Distributed organization.